The Gibbses’ house
is uninhabitable, but
they still stop by to
get their mail.74 June 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
TREVORPAULUSOutside the building, Jenny sees one of her neighbors from the
third floor emerge wearing only a towel. He’d been taking a bath,
he tells her, when he heard something in the kitchen go pop! He
thought it might have been the boiler. The man in the towel runs
back inside to collect his clothes, then out again.
Smoke begins puffing up from beneath the eaves of the build-
ing. The sirens get louder and louder, until the fire engine reaches
Jenny’s corner.
Thank goodness.
And then the fire engine does something that makes no sense
to her: It keeps going.
We contacted Andover. They are having the same issue.
They cannot send a response. —Dispatch, Lawrence
Fire Department, to deputy chief, radio communicationTHE LAWRENCE FIRE DEPARTMENT operates out of five stations
covering six square miles of land divided by the Merrimack River.
When it ma kes its standard response to a single-a larm fire, like the
one at 35 Phillips Street, it has in reserve only one pump and one
ladder to cover the rest of the city.
There are now at least five fires burning at once. Chief Brian
Moriarty, directing the department’s response from Car 20, calls
for backup, known as mutual aid, from the neighboring communi-
ties of Andover and North Andover. Customarily, the chiefs of those
departments will send men and machines to Lawrence, then back-
fill their resources from departments next door.
But the Lawrence dispatcher reports that neither Andover nor
North Andover can send mutual aid because they too are dealing
with multiple simultaneous fires.
Mut ua l aid wasn’t designed for this kind of sit uation. Rather than
sharing resources, the three towns are effectively competing for them.
The Eastern End of Springfield Street,
Lawrence
QUINN AND THE FIREFIGHTERS work their way toward Springfield’s
western end, putting out four basement fires, one after another. Peo-
ple are flagging them down in the street, arms waving, reporting
new fires the dispatcher didn’t even know about. It is exhausting.
Firefighters are, in a sense, tactical athletes. Twenty minutes in a
house fire can require the same amount of energy most people push
out in an eight-hour workday.
Normally, you get to a house fire and there’s probably a frantic
resident—the homeowner, a neighbor, somebody yelling. Panicking.
You run interference, you calm them down, you gently—profession-
ally—ease them out of the way. And then, afterward, when the fire
is nothing but a bad smell, and you’ve saved the day, they want to
hug you. None of that happened on this day. There was no time. No
niceties, no “I’m sorry, ma’am,” no “Happy to help, sir.” It was: Get
in, get out, get to the next one.
Firefighters say a fire doubles in size every minute. Jenny Cace-
res isn’t sure how long her building has been burning before Engine
No. 5 reaches it—fifteen minutes? twenty?—but by then thick
smoke is pouring from beneath its roof.
The three-story structure looks familiar to Quinn, and then he
remembers: In 2008, a massive blaze destroyed fourteen buildings
in this neighborhood. The fire department had made its last stand
right here, at this address. They had not only beaten back the fire,
they had saved the building.
The difference was this: In 2008, Quinn was one of forty fire-
fighters on scene. Today, he is one of three.
LAWRENCE’S HOUSING STOCK, mostly wooden triple-deckers
and two-family houses, was built a hundred years ago for the city’s
mill workers. The houses go right down the street—rows and rows
of them, spaced so close together a man can barely walk between
them with his shoulders squared.
Buildings in the region were framed balloon style: Builders
threw up two-by-fours around the perimeter, then tied the floors
into each story. That’s different from housing construction today,
which is platformed: You build an eight-foot wall, build the floor on
top of it, then tie it into the wall. You build the next floor on top of
that. Every platform is effectively a fire-stop.
In a balloon-frame structure, a fire that starts in the basement
and gets into the chase space can run all the way to the cockloft—the
cramped, unusable space between the topmost ceiling of a building
and the roof—w ithout any fire-stop in bet ween. It w ill blow straight
out the roof before any of the floors in between catch fire. A basement
fire effectively turns the entire building into a chimney.Outside Andover
4:15 P.M.
ANDOVER FIRE CHIEF Michael Mansfield is a couple miles out-
side of town, heading home, when the call comes in over the radio
from Grassfields restaurant—a stove fire that will quickly be extin-
guished by staff. Almost immediately afterward there is a barrage
of calls for fires in and around downtown.
Something is up.
He turns around and heads back to the station via Route 93.
The dispatcher is reporting that North Andover and Lawrence
are experiencing the same event. And that’s when all hell broke loose.At 4:50 p.m., in the kitchen of Bueno Malo, a restaurant in Ando-
ver, a gas burner shoots a flame ten feet into the air.
Mansfield glances into his side-view mirror as he enters town
on Route 28 and sees smoke billowing from buildings in Law-
rence. He gets on the radio and orders a dispatcher to send out
a Code Red, summoning all off-duty firefighters to their respec-
tive stations.
In the Shawsheen neighborhood, he finds Engine No. 1 and an
ambulance at a house fire. A state trooper approaches him. Did
Mansfield remember the situation in Danvers a while back? The
gas over-pressurization situation? This sounds like something sim-
ilar, doesn’t it? Mansfield has had the same thought.
Within the first ten or twelve minutes, the Andover Fire Depart-
ment—three engines, one aerial ladder, and two ambulances—has
run out of resources. Mansfield puts out the call to MEMA, the
Massachusetts Emergency Management Authority, to initiate the